


for valediction, or vigilance

by metonomia



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-27
Updated: 2013-03-27
Packaged: 2017-12-06 17:16:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/738140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/metonomia/pseuds/metonomia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the MegExchange, for the prompts "Haruspicy; Dressing up in dad's Samsuit shenanigans"</p>
<p>Includes consent issues to the tune of possession, body horror to the tune of divination, and Meg, who is a demon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	for valediction, or vigilance

**Author's Note:**

> For Dreamwidth user possiblie for the MegExchange - I expanded your haruspicy prompt slightly into extispicy, and used it to explore the Samsuit prompt, I hope it pleases!
> 
> Title from Kimberley Johnson's poem "On Divination by Birds"

Torture is not all she learns from Alistair. Once she has been broken and remade a thousand times, once she has taken the knife, trembling, and in movements fashioned more after her long-dead human mother's cooking than Alistair's metal caresses, dices up the soul hanging in her place, once her pupils have blown permanently and she has in her turn rebirthed hundreds of humans into the demonic host, her teacher takes her aside conspiratorially. Which, she reflects, is how he does everything. Familiarly, secretly, promising nothing more than an end to pain if you just do as he says. And she has learned to stand the pain, but the more important lesson, the one that, she thinks, makes her a demon now, is that if you can avoid pain, you should, because you matter, and it is right to do what you must to help yourself along. The Father’s will imposes itself, but in between and around and even during assignments, you, yourself, and you again come first. Whatever the cost, she reminds herself, turning her back on her own students, who are almost there, so close to beating the rack and saving themselves - but if Alistair has an opening for her, to get her out further, well, her proteges can suck it.

"The Father will have need of you," he tells her, and she loses control of herself for a moment, shuddering into smoke with her delight.

"If you can master a few skills," Alistair continues, smiling in the way that means she is disappointing him.

"I can," she says, self-assured, recontained in the old dead body that has been torn away and rebuilt so many times to get to this moment.

"And," he says, looking her up and down, "You'll need to get a new meatsuit."

* * *

_Liver, lungs, breastbone, vertebrae, ribs, colon, heart_. She carried the sulphur of hell out with her - angels think they have such a monopoly on purity, but there is nothing purer, nothing more refined, than the smoky cloud of purpose that is the base of a demon. Her own self purifies her for the ritual, and purifies the sacrifice, the vessel, too. The divination-art of possession is a dance now, and Meg its prima ballerina, its high priestess. Not any demon can climb out of hell, even with the Father’s blessing. Any demon, once out, can force itself into a vessel; it’s an act of violence that is predatory, almost defensive, in a way that Meg distantly knows she as a human would have condemned, but is now simply a fact to her. And not every demon can do what she has been trained to, not simply to possess but to manipulate, to orchestrate, to use the body she has stolen as more than just a ride.

She chokes out Sam Winchester’s lungs and wraps herself all through his organs with a coroner’s care. She bypasses the liver after a quick examination - all it foretells is his own brother’s ever-increasing weakness for alcohol, and the concern is good, she can use that, mommy issues and daddy issues and brother issues all bottled up, but it’s nothing she couldn’t discern from without.

The lungs are healthy, broad - Sam Winchester is a big man, and he keeps himself to that quaint little idea that a food pyramid is a better indicator of what you want than, well, what you actually want. There is little for her to use here, but she reads - simply curious, which, she thinks, is her best vice, unless they’ve made not giving a fuck an official vice already - the map of smoke inhalation from the fire the night Azazel made him what he is. Knowing something about Sam that he doesn’t is heady, if not surprising - hulking hunters, with their “secret” knowledge of the world beyond humanity, always think they know more than anyone else. Doctors probably told John Winchester that his sons had no lasting damage from the fire that killed Mary, and they were right, in a general scientific manner. It’s not damage, but there is information, plans coded there, etched on infant tissue by the burn of a mother’s bones, and something like that can’t simply be outgrown. It tells Meg what is coming, things she has been told, things she has deduced, things that she isn’t supposed to know yet or ever. Her Father is in Sam Winchester’s lungs, and it nearly shocks her out of her task to see, for an instant, the greatest power in hell walking the earth with the very body she now possesses. What she is doing is irreverent, and not precisely part of her assignment, but that only makes it headier and more worthwhile. Who knows what other pots of gold she might uncover at the end of this special rainbow?

The bones and vertebrae she cannot read without killing Sam, and she’s not stupid enough to be tempted, so she simply wraps herself around them, weaving a shroud among his ribs, creating strong anchor points to hold her in the vessel as she moves on. The colon tells her little, though she weaves herself all through the stomach and intestines, to be sure. Whole, untangled, everything in working order - in any other body, it would be a straightforward read of luck and long life, even protection, and she allows herself to momentarily enjoy the great trick being played on the Winchesters, and the work that has gone into making it happen.

The heart is last, as always. If you want the meatsuit to be of any use, Alistair always said, you have to keep the blood pumping naturally while you do the rest. If you let the brain keep control of that little function until the last moment, the body will feel natural, will let you slide into power without a fight. Sam Winchester’s heart is easy, and, deliciously, she can read in his brain how he fears this, how some instinct in him knows he is easy prey, how it would hurt him to know he was born to play host to a demon. That drop of her father’s blood, carried and placed by Azazel, has multiplied, recycling itself smoothly, making itself a part of the human in a way that magnetizes Meg, pulling her in like a random possession never could. That draw of her Father, the promise of his plan, is more intoxicating than anything, and sure, she’s playing with the Winchesters for her own fun, her own revenge, but now it feels like her Father wants her there, beckons her to burrow in further, and she can’t deny the power in that.

“You want me here,” she gloats as she works Sam’s voicebox for the first time. His constricted consciousness recoils against her presence - he thinks she’s talking to him, she realizes, laughing again with his voice, and sure, that works. Those few drops of blood are part of him now, and they cry out to her. The boy’s power recognizes its kin in her, and flares in welcome.

“A girl could get used to this kind of treatment,” she murmurs, feeling more like herself in Sam’s body than she has since, well, since Meg. It feels so right to keep the name she took from that girl. They did such wonderful things together, and even now the soul once called Meg Masters is cutting and crawling her own way into the Father’s service. It’s a gift to the girl - a tribute, if Meg went in for that sort of thing - to carry her name for now. When her new sister makes it out of hell, Meg will return it, and remake herself again.

* * *

Meg reads the signs in the heart of a hunter she kills with Sam Winchester’s body. It’s thick and heavy with the blockages of age and too much road-food, but strong, pumping heavily for several minutes after she removes it. A good heart for reading the signs on Dean Winchester. He will come after his brother, of course, it tells her, but he must be led.

“BRB, Sammy,” Meg says. She sinks, dormant and watchful, into the corners of Sam’s mind, backtracking, not undoing her work but hiding it. She releases the heart last, squeezing it sharply, and the meatsuit jolts back to life, and Meg sighs and waits to claw her way back into power again.


End file.
